Dried meats are often eaten as snack foods. Most such meats are sold as dry sausage (e.g., hard salami), kippered meat, or jerky. The moisture content of these dried meats varies, with dry sausage typically having moisture content (expressed as the weight percentage of water in the product) on the order of 25-40%, kippered meats having about 25-40% moisture, and jerky having about 15-30% moisture. Most meats will have a hard texture that is difficult to chew if the moisture content falls appreciably below about 15%.
Recent dietary trends have led many people to reduce carbohydrates in their diets and eat more protein. Beef jerky sales have benefited from these trends as consumers seek snacks to replace traditional starch-based snacks such as potato chips and pretzels. The chewy texture of beef jerky, however, yields a different snack experience from that associated with the light crunch of potato chips, for example. Consequently, many consumers are still drawn to carbohydrate-rich, starch-based snacks instead of beef jerky.
Some have attempted to provide a crisp meat-based snack that more closely resembles potato chips or other carbohydrate-based snacks. U.S. Pat. No. 3,497,363, for example, suggests a crisp fried meat snack formed by deep-fat frying a freeze-dried slice of meat. The freeze-drying is said to be critical to the crisp, chewable nature of the chip. Unfortunately, freeze-drying can be relatively costly on a commercial scale and deep-fat frying increases the fat content of the chips, leading to an expensive, high-fat snack.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,512,993 proposes mixing meat or seafood with water and a 50/50 blend of potato and corn starch to form a dough that is cooked under pressure and sliced. The resultant slices are dried and deep-fat fried before eating. Frying lends the chips a flaky texture instead of the “hard, horny texture” of the dried chips. This product is high in fat (with fat contents of 30-40% suggested) and starch; this makes the chips less desirable to those controlling caloric and carbohydrate intake from snack foods.
Others have posited approaches for drying sausage slices to make a snack food without having to fry the slices. U.S. Pat. No. 6,383,549 and U.S. Patent Application Publications 2003/0113433 and 2004/0039727, for example, suggest such processes. Most of these, however, are not well adapted to commercial-scale production of an inexpensive snack food and are limited to home-scale batches or expensive specialty products.